I have always had a shameful yearning – as only someone who is white, middle-class, straight, free from infirmities and hails from Kent can – to have more claim to be part of an oppressed minority. My accent alone (dread RP) marks me out as the sort of soft southern flossie whose closest brush with adversity was a marshmallow burn at Brownie camp. So I had long waved farewell to any fond ambition of writing a book entitled, “Rowan Pelling: My Struggle”.

At least, that was the situation until yesterday, when the Tory MP Sir Peter Luff mounted a spirited campaign for the ignored needs of our schools’ left-handed pupils. Left-handers, declared Sir Peter, are having their self-esteem eroded because they are not being given the correct support in the classroom. Their handwriting is frequently illegible and “children who are using right-handed scissors instead of left-handed scissors and can’t cut out start thinking they are not good at art and design”. I couldn’t read on for tears misting my eyes. If the MP had mentioned the agony of trying to strip potatoes with a right-handed peeler, or cut brambles with mass-market secateurs, then I would have been in floods. It turns out that, unrecognised by the masses, I have spent my whole life battling a serious congenital condition.

Yes, dear reader, I am left-handed in a right-handed world. Where is the all-important return key as I type this article? On the blinking right, just as honoured guests are seated to a host’s right and your loo flushes à droit – the French expression for “to the right”, which swiftly became “adroit” in English, understood to mean skilful and dexterous. Hang on a mo: doesn’t “dexterous” find its etymological root in the Latin word dexter, meaning – yup – right. Conversely, we southpaws are sinister, gauche spawn of Satan. We find it harder to learn musical instruments, to offer the correct cheek when kissed and to play field hockey. We spend our lives feeding train tickets into turnstiles that won’t let us through. Rare is the keggy-handed individual who doesn’t recognise the tell-tale smudge of blue on their little finger, as they drag their hand over freshly inked paragraphs.

We widdershins types can be strangely drawn to one another. At school I once sat at a long table where my three desk-mates were also left-handers, and my husband’s left-handedness was yet another sign we viewed life from the same wonky viewpoint. As a child in the Sixties he was under pressure to use his right hand, and I commiserated with his school corps tales of trying to operate a 303 rifle left-handedly; the bolt was on the right, meaning he had to put the gun down to eject the cartridge case. Indeed, most guns are manufactured with the right-handed and right-eyed in mind. I even found one report that suggest a greater percentage of Mollie Dookers suffered serious injuries in battle than their right-handed counterparts, but that’s probably because we turn the wrong way, tread on our dance partner’s feet and are generally ill-fated. We have a higher rate of injury, alcoholism, schizophrenia and, just to add to the catalogue of joy, we die earlier than right-paws.

No wonder Sir Peter Luff suggests that the first question any child should be asked when they enter a class is which hand they favour. You wouldn’t want your right-handed kid sitting next to a sinister pupil, because they’d either set up a still, or spontaneously combust.

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My own household is alarming. My younger son is a leftie too, meaning that, whereas in the general population 10 per cent of people are left-handed, in our house it’s a whopping 75 per cent. We should have a hazard notice affixed to our front door and, perhaps, some form of state aid. If dyslexic children get grants to buy computers, I don’t see why left-handers shouldn’t get a hand-out for scissors.